Thursday, May 28, 2009

The rampant expansion of the Old School Renaissance is driving me mad, mad I tell you! For nearly twenty years, I thought I was just about the last guy on earth who gave a crap about AD&D, or OD&D. I was pretty isolated, I guess. I just didn't run into anyone else who still played. I hadn't paid any attention to the internet since the late eighties, when it was all still bulletin boards and Zork. My wife finally insisted we get access, and so I start poking and googling around, and low and behold, Dragonsfoot.I lurked there for years, then Knights & Knaves, Original D&D Discussion, more, more, blogs show up, It's an embarrassment of riches.Now the game blogs are multiplying like Borg, I can't friggen keep up! I've only got a few listed in my side bar, but my gaming folder in my favorites on IE takes a 12 count to scroll to the bottom. I feel like I've been dragging myself across the desert for two decades and fallen into a gaming oasis. Now there are so many great sites, and bloggers, putting up so much great stuff, that I know I'm missing a lot of it. There isn't time in the day for me to hit all the rpg sites I like. It's maddening!I can stuff myself on tasty new Old Guard gaming until d20s and character sheets come out my nose. I have to pace myself now, it's gotten to the point where I'm considering working out a blog visiting schedule, since I can only spend so much time online, and there's so much ground to cover. Even the fights are awesome to me. So much eye-gouging and hair-pulling is only possible because the game is still important, and thus, still alive. So, create, share, argue, discuss, theorize, and fight on you mad bastards, fight on!

Twisted into existance by infusions of beholder bile, elder brain fluid, and possibly cave cricket essence, goblors are mutated goblins created by the mind flayers to serve as expendable weapons and obedient guard beasts. Goblors have very little self-will, and dutifully follow the orders of those they perceive to be in authority.A goblor appears as a thin and freakish goblin with a hugely expanded brain-case and a fist-sized third eye on the end of a semi-moveable stalk which protrudes from it's forehead. They wear no armor and little clothing, but are covered with chitinous protective plates.Despite their enormous brains, goblor are of low intelligence. Their great mass of brain tissue serves only to generate the psionic energy needed to drive their special attack.Three times per day, a goblor may fire a mind blast similar to that of a mind flayer. All within a 6" directional cone of 1/2" diameter at the point of emanation, (the third eye), and 2" diameter at the extreme range are affected. Unlike the mental weapon of a mind flayer, the mind blast of a goblor is raw and unfocused. Those struck by it take 2-8 points of damage directly, and also must save vs psionic attack at short range, or else suffer a random temporary effect.

Goblors are most often encountered in the service of their makers, the illithids. Some few of them have been stolen, or lured away from the slippery clutches of the mind flayers to find places amongst tribes of normal humanoids. Goblin and Hobgoblin chieftains prize them for their unthinking obedience, and for the unsettling effect they have on underlings.

* The image at the top is actually a preliminary rough from 1982 by Dave Powell for the Mars Attacks! card set done by Wally Wood. I saw it and the first thing that popped into my mind was, Psionic goblin!

I got this image at my favorite non-gaming blog, Golden age comic book stories. The blogger, Mr Door Tree, puts up beautiful scans of pop art in dozens of catagories, including comics, pulp magazine covers and illustrations, golden age illustrations, and many others. I highly recommend visiting, if you have a couple of weeks to kill. His archive is huge and fascinating. You will find much relating to the fiction that The Game is founded on.

Blame for the existance of these malignent birds is often laid at the taloned feet of Corvekli, the infamous murder wizard. It is unknown if he created the foul things, or simply found and taught them. What is understood is that the gravediggers fear no lack of work where strangler crows fly.Strangler crows get their name from the method of their special attack. The birds are always encountered in pairs as this attack requires that they work in conjunction.The birds carry a length of rope or a cord, or sometimes a scarf of at least eight feet. When they find a suitable victim in the open, the crows fly directly at him at throat level, with the cord stretched between them. They cross paths behind the target and fly with all their might straight up. Strangler crows are unnaturally strong for their size. A pair can easily lift an elf-size or smaller victim to his toes, if not off his feet entirely.Two pairs working together can hoist a large man in the same manner.If the crows act with surprise, and score a successful hit, the victim has a number of rounds equal to half of his constitution score to free himself of the garrote before he passes out from lack of air.Should they manage to murder a victim successfully, the crows will loot the body of any small valuables, and probably eat the eyes.Such loot as they obtain, the crows trade to willing humanoids, or others who are able to provide them with the delicacies they crave.

Thanks to the help of Max Davenport, this is what the Multi-Edition Stat Column is supposed to look like. Max sent me an e-mail with half the column showing me how to use the colegroup tag to format the information. I have absolutely no idea what that means, but, I can cut and past. I finished the column by clipping bits of Max's example and sticking them in here and there until I got what I wanted.

I've enjoyed Max's blog, Malevolent & Benign, for some time now. Go there and say nice things about him. http://mbenign.blogspot.com/

Thursday, May 14, 2009

After fighting with blogger for four hours, I had to admit defeat. For some reason I don't understand, it just won't publish my stat column in the arrangement I have it in Word. This is only one battle though, not the war. I'll get it to do what I want eventually.

Anyway, I thought I would bring some photos over from my woodworking blog, since the subject matter over laps with gaming in this instance. At least, it has to do with the pulp magazine roots of the game. And with book storage, I know none of us has enough book space.

This is a bookcase I built as an experiment, to work out the idea. It has flat panel sides, and I put pulp magazine covers in the panels to make it powerful visually. They aren't actual magazine covers, I'd never cut those up on a trial piece. These are scans that I cleaned up and shaped in Photoshop, and then printed on iron-on transfer material. The transfers I actually ironed onto a backing of nice and dry 1/4" plywood.

I just picked out a semi random assortment of interesting covers of magazines and books for this first one. I have plans to make some more with various themes to them, fantasy, science fiction, Dungeons & Dragons. I may save the D&D theme for a big bookcase/cabinet with doors so that I can put classic game art in all the door panels. It's iffy that I can get away with that though, my wife requires that I make her something she likes for everything I do that I like. I'd have to build her something pretty good to get away with a D&D theme case large enough to hold my collection.

Here's a close up of the top left side panel. Science Fiction Quarterly was a late compilation mag. You have to love the illustration. Rocket suit and scantily clad girl, that's science fiction there, man. The bottom image on that side is The Dragon #1, so there's a little gaming in there. Above that is the J Allen St John cover of All-Story Weekly featuring Thuvia, Maid of Mars, then an N C Wyeth cover for Legends of Charlemagne,and an issue of Adventure, with a great full-rigged sailing ship.

On this side, the bottom cover is JRR Tolkien's drawing for the Hobbit cover. I really like his watercolors. Then you've got an old Collier's cover, a nice Planet Stories, The issue of Black Mask which featured The Maltese Falcon, and N C Wyeth's cover for Treasure Island.

I just gave this piece a few coats of a nice black satin, and then a couple layers of satin polyurethane.

I have some ideas for gaming furniture, and when I get some built, I'll post them here, as well as the wood working blog. Everybody has done the ultimate gaming table thing to death, so I was thinking of other pieces. Chests, end tables, and bookcases that actually are useful furniture above and beyond the game related functions, and wouldn't be objectionable to your understanding, but non-gaming spouse. I have one.

Let me know if you guys have any ideas, or wants on the subject. I'm not adverse to building stuff for my gaming brothers. Or sisters.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

I'm very much heartened at the successes of the retro-clones. I think they are our best chance at continued old guard publishing ventures. In my imaginings of the best possible future for The Game, Wizards would release TSR D&D to the fans and concentrate on their own game, whatever they want to call it. I know this won't happen. Hasbro holds their leash and it's notorious for sitting on IP even if it does nothing with it.

I see alot of individual old school Renaissance publishers putting out material for their various retro-clones, Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, Basic Fantasy Role Playing Game, and they are all largely interchangeable, content wise, with each other, and with Original Dungeons & Dragons, Basic Dungeons & Dragons, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.I worry abit about fragmenting of the Renaissance though, since the clones are being played as much as games in them selves, as they are used as publishing vehicles.

I know, I know, I worry too much. Can't help it, it's in my nature to look for problems before they make themselves known, and head them off. I make a great first officer, but an unsettling captain.Anyway, I have some ideas of publishing some stuff of my own to add to the OSR, but I don't what my stuff to be only applicable to one retro-clone. I want a broadly inclusive Domain of the Old Guard.To this end, I thought I'd see if I could write up a compilation monster stat column that would be fairly easily used with all the clones, and their progenitors.

I cross indexed the monster stats for all the old school D&D games that I had on hand to see what stats carry over from game to game, and what new categories appeared. Then I squashed them all down to a single column, and separated all the stats that appear in every edition of The Game. I moved them to the top of the column for utility, and then arranged the others below in order of how I most often need them.Stats that appear in all editions, say so to the left, the remaining stats have the games they are used in also listed to the left.I'm sure most people reading this blog are familiar with the games abbreviations, but just in case.Original Dungeons & Dragons-OD&D.Swords & Wizardry-S&W.Labyrinth Lord-LL.Basic Fantasy Role Playing Game-BFRPG.Advanced Dungeons & Dragons-AD&D. (OSRIC )Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, second edition-2E.Hackmaster fourth edition-HM4E.I also split the column into a combat statistics block, and a general information block.

Should I manage to carry through on my project, this is the arrangement I'll use for all monsters that will appear in The Old Guard Guide. I hope this way, my stuff will be useful to the widest possible gaming audience.

The Giant Ground Stirge is a solitary, nocturnal, stalking predator which lives on fresh blood just as it's small, winged cousins do. Capable of remaining motionless for hours, the stirge will slowly approach sleeping or otherwise unaware prey, freezing in place if it's intended victim stirs, and only returning to it's stalking once it is certain it has not been detected.The stirge's hide is brown and bark-like, and it is covered with branch-like appendages with sparse,"leaves", which seem to flutter in the breeze.In poor light, when the stirge prefers to hunt, it will likely appear as a broken, scrubby,tree.

In an attack, the stirge attempts to stab it's proboscis into the victims artery. If it's first attack hits, it will wrap it's long, segmented legs around the prey to immobilize it, and then drain blood equal to 1-8 hit points per round until it reaches a total of 30 points. If it's first attack misses for any reason, the stirge will speedily retreat and try again the next night.

* All right, damn it! For no apparent reason, blogger insists on smashing all my stats to the right. I had them in a center point column nice and neat and it keeps pushing everything to the left when I publish the post. now it looks like a pile of letters and numbers. Does anyone know how to prevent this?** still not right, I had a column of open space between the stats and the abbreviations, but it won't publish that way.

My brother gave it to me. He's Chief I.T. guy at a local bank, and was tasked to put together a clip show of Star Trek images for a presentation to bank personnel. The speaker was Jason Eberl.Why, or who it was that thought that a speaker who's subject was the philosophy revealed by Star Trek should give a presentation to a small town bank staff is unknown to me. My brother says that he enjoyed the blank looks and confused stares as much as the speech itself.

After the talk, Eberl gave me little brudder a copy of his book, since he liked the clip show so much. Little brudder gave me the book to digest and condense for him since he says he only got 17 pages into it before grinding to a halt.I'm about halfway through it now, and I can't blame him. Eberl obviously knows and loves both Trek and philosophy, but his writing is like chewing dry oatmeal.Fortunately, several other philosophers contribute chapters to the book, so it's not all tough going.

The part of this that applies to Old School gaming is a paragraph in a chapter called, Death and rebirth of a Vulcan mind by Walter Robinson, writing as Ritoku, Professor of Vulcan Philosophy, Starfleet Academy.

"Quantum physics is full of examples such as the principle of uncertainty, the wave-particle paradox, the problem of non-locality in particle interaction, and so forth. Even at the level of pure logic there is inherent uncertainty as entailed by the "Principle of Incompleteness," known on Earth as Godel's Theorem, which states that given any formal system of logic sufficiently complicated to be descriptive of experience, if it explicitly states all functional axioms, theorems, and postulates, it will contain contradictions. The Principle of Incompleteness demonstrates that in order to maintain non-contradiction in formal reasoning, it is necessary to have open-endedness."

I thought to myself when I read that, "I'd game with that Dude."

It looks to me to toe-nail into the Old School philosophy quiet nicely. A lot of the difference between Old and New is the fact that Old is incomplete by the lights of the New. OD&D, and AD&D don't have a "core mechanic", at least not as I would consider one. They're really many disparate subsystems held together by the direction of the DM. Old School is like a suit of armor, it's composed of many parts which don't always fit together and must be worn and directed to achieve it's full effect.

New school often seems to want mechanical perfection and seamless functioning. It seems to lean toward ever more complicated systems that attempt to cover all possibilities. It wants a system that can stand on it's own without a guiding intellect.

I was once of a similar mind. When I was young, I was a ruthless Min/Maxer, and I always sought to come up with the Total System. That clockwork set of rules that could account for every possible action in the game. That's a perpetual motion machine, however, it's not going to happen. I learned eventually that the tighter you close your fist, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. Heh...

Old School's incompleteness is completeness. A perfect simulation of an in-game fantasy reality can't be achieved with formal set of rules, but it can be approached if the rules are seen as guidelines, or sign posts to direct the flow of the game in the direction that is most congenial to your gaming spirit.The fact that Old Guard games are open-ended, system wise, is what allows them to expand to cover all extingentcies. Games that exhaustively define all skills, and abilities, block off unlisted possibilities in the minds of players. They look at the rules as a menu of choices, as the only choices available to them. This shrinks the scope of the game and makes it less than it can be.

That is the contradiction in modern gaming. The Game is supposed to be a vehicle for the imagination. A certain amount of structure is necessary for the game to hang together, but too great a degree of definition in the rules begins to blinker the players more than it enhances the game. So, in order to maintain non-contradiction in the game, only a certain level of sophistication in the rules needs to be allowed.

The degree of that sophistication and its level of definition is for each of you to determine for your own game. Hell, you might even let the players have some input. Not me though.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

The first image is another by the mighty Bruce Timm. Timm's work can be deceptively simple at first glance, but he is a master of form and shading. I never get tired of this image of Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars. The elements of this image, the rock, Dejah, the two moons, all flow upwards in a shallow curve that pulls the eye up, and back down again. It's also not your standard depiction of a pulp science fiction heroine. Dejah looks pensive, as though she were contemplating something sad and of great importance.

Great art suggests more than it tells. With no background other than the rock and the moons, any number of reasons for, or stories about, the cause of her mood come to mind.You can see that a breeze is moving her hair, but with no background, it could be an evening wind with the moons rising across the martian desert, or it could be a storm coming in off the mountains.

This is by Frank Cho, another of my favorite comic artists. Frank has a feel, pardon the expression, for the female form that's second to none. He's also good with tharks.This is a limited print for the San Diego comic con, if I recall correctly. Frank loves good old Edgar Rice Burroughs and has done a lot of Barsoom related art.

Pixar would do well to study Frank's work for their planned John Carter of Mars movie. I've heard that they intend to do it as a live action with cgi backgrounds and creatures, like Jacksons Lord of the Rings. I would really like to have high hopes for this movie, but I'm still afraid of disappointment. You know how often book adaptations manage to suck. We'll just have to wait and see.

One more Frank Cho. Dejah and her faithful WoolaDejah is described as having skin of a light red coppery color, but you rarely see her that way in illustrations, and that's too bad. The hot, exotic, alien princess should be as different as possible, that's what makes her hot and exotic.

Just as an aside, I visited Io9, the scifi news site, awhile back and they were discussing the Pixar movie. There was a comment thread conversation going on, and it really drove home to me just how far removed from my own point of view, the modern syfy consumer has become.

Most of the thread was posts explaining how Burroughs John Carter was an example of the patriarchal, colonialist, imperialist narrative, and the others were posts agreeing with them, and patting themselves on the back for being so enlightened.

Sigh.

Apparently, John Carter is a racist because he's a white man who kills red and green people. I'm not pulling your leg here. I don't have a link anymore, it was a while ago. You can go and dig for it if you like. It'll just depress you though.

I suggest you instead roll up some new characters for your pulse pounding adventures on Mars!Fierce white apes, brutal green men, exotic alien princesses, and flashing sword play awaits you!

Sunday, May 3, 2009

I really like this image. It's not the Frazetta that most of you are used to, but I think it does an excellent job of conveying the fierce and brutal energy of R.E. Howard's Conan. I don't know if this is the best way to put it, but this feels like the Sword & Sorcery atmosphere that OD&D is built on to me. The dynamic tension in the figure makes your lips curl and your nostrils flair. You just know Conan is about to explode in a lightening storm of razor edged steel.

Crom!

Below is a short comic Timm did for I don't know what. Conan does have a sense of humor after all. And it's just the sort of humor that shows up in The Game by my experience.I really like the series of expressions by the girl when Conan starts laughing.